Island Enclaves

Islands have a unique hold on our imagination as intriguing places where - as Thomas More and Jonathan Swift showed in their fiction - fantastic utopic or dystopic worlds are possible. Perhaps such ideas developed because we are implicitly aware of the unique political and social arrangements that can be designed when a region is so distinctly separate.Island Enclaves highlights the idiosyncratic forms of governance that occur in places that are both a part of, and apart from, national boundaries. Examining subnational island jurisdictions such as Guantanamo Bay, Macau, Aruba, the Isle of Man, and Prince Edward Island, Godfrey Baldacchino shows how these distinct locales arrange special relationships with larger metropolitan powers. He also deals with the politics, economics, and diplomacy of islands that have been engineered as detention camps, offshore finance centres, military bases, heritage parks or otherwise autonomous regions. More than a study of how detached regions are governed, Island Enclaves displays the ways in which these jurisdictions are pioneering some of the modern world's most creative - and shadowy - forms of sovereignty and government.